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BAD OLD SUMMERTIME: A girl cools off in the Washington Square Park fountain yesterday. New Yorkers in 1896 had it far worse -- forced to sleep on tenement rooftops amid a heat index of 120. Photo: J.C. Rice

(Library of Congress)

Don’t sweat it, New York.

While this month’s sizzling weather may feel unbearable, with the temperature hitting a high of 97 degrees yesterday, tying a record, it pales in comparison to the heat wave that city residents endured in the summer of ’96 — 1896, that is.

In his new book, “Hot Time in the Old Town,” historian Edward Kohn details how New Yorkers faced hellish conditions over 10 brutally hot days in early August. Over that time, 1,300 people died in Manhattan alone, making it the worst urban heat-related disaster in US history.

With the city’s heat index routinely surpassing 120 degrees and nighttime temperatures never once dropping below 70, the city was transformed into what one local newspaper described as “an inferno of brick and stone.”

Without air conditioning or even reliable deliveries of ice, tenements became ovenlike death traps. Almost the entire Lower East Side, around 250,000 people, scrambled up to their roofs to sleep. Those who failed to procure a spot on a sweltering roof were forced to sleep on fire escapes, windowsills and stoops. It was not uncommon to hear of people who rolled over in their sleep, falling to their death. One man even drowned after turning over — his bed was a Hudson River pier at West 37th Street.

But the hellish heat itself was the main killer. City papers began reporting on a shortage of coffins. Overcrowded morgues had to lay bodies on the floor.

About 200 horses a day died of heatstroke, and their bodies littered the streets, adding to the overpowering stench of steaming excrement and rotting garbage.

In the stifling cauldron of squalor, most New Yorkers faced a scarcity of water to drink, or even bathe in. Piped-in water was, in the words of Kohn, an “unimaginable luxury” for tenement dwellers, and “home refrigerators did not achieve widespread use until the First World War.” Food and milk went bad in the blink of an eye.

Making matters worse, only one company, Charles Morse’s Consolidated Ice Company, sold ice, and it set the price well above what the working class — already buckling under a severe economic depression — could afford.

Only on the last day of the crisis did the city finally take action, directing the police to deliver free ice to those in need. The distribution was at the urging of police commissioner — and future president — Theodore Roosevelt.